Research Recap with Skye: TikTok and ADHD - Sorting Facts from Misinformation

Summary

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Hacking Your ADHD – Research Recap with Skye: TikTok and ADHD – Sorting Facts from Misinformation

Host: William Curb
Guest: Skye Waterson
Release Date: October 24, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of the Research Recap series investigates a 2022 research paper titled “TikTok and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, A Cross Sectional Study of Social Media Content Quality.” William and Skye delve into how TikTok serves as a platform for ADHD information—clarifying whether what’s being shared is accurate, misleading, or simply personal experiences. They examine the methods and findings of the paper, candidly discuss the challenges with mental health content on social media, and consider the practical implications for both viewers and creators.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Hosts’ Relationship With TikTok and Short-Form Content

[03:44] Skye’s Perspective:

• Skye previously used TikTok but decided to stop due to its negative impact on her mental health, though she still consumes similar content on Instagram and YouTube Shorts.

“I value my mental health... I ended up just turning it off... I just have decided TikTok isn’t for me...” – Sky Waterson ([03:44])

[04:26] William’s Experience:

• William describes TikTok’s algorithm as “actively detrimental” to his health. He notes average users spend about 95 minutes per day on the app, equating to hundreds of videos, given their short length.

“Average TikTok user watches about 95 minutes of TikTok a day... the average user is going to be seeing hundreds of videos a day.” – William Curb ([04:26])

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2. Study Purpose and Methodology

[06:20] Study Goals:

• TikTok is a major platform for health information, with #ADHD as the seventh most popular health-related hashtag.
• The paper’s aim: Determine the quality and accuracy of ADHD information available in top TikTok videos.

[07:18] Assessment Tools:

• Researchers analyzed the top 100 #ADHD TikToks using:
  • PEMAT-A/V: Assessed understandability, not factual accuracy.
  • JAMA Benchmark Criteria: Evaluated attribution, transparency, currency, and whether sources were cited.

[08:47] Challenges with JAMA Criteria:

• Skye points out that even well-meaning creators often fail JAMA standards, mainly due to lack of explicit citations.

“I probably still didn’t do it according to JAMA because I didn’t know about JAMA.” – Skye Waterson ([08:19])

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3. Types of Content: Useful, Misleading, and Personal Experience

[10:09] Misleading Examples:

• TikToks making unsubstantiated claims, e.g., “if you listen to this, it will tell you if you have ADHD,” or equating “out of sight, out of mind” with object permanence.

“If you listen to this, it will tell you if you have ADHD… just kind of off the wall wild stuff...” – Skye Waterson ([11:23])

• Conflating clinical concepts (like emotional dysregulation) with symptoms.
• Incorrect statistics, such as claiming ADHD is equally common in boys and girls.

[13:40] Classification:

• Videos were coded as:
  • Misleading: Contained factual inaccuracies or unsubstantiated claims.
  • Personal Experience: Shared individual stories, unless containing generalizations (then marked misleading).
  • Useful: Offered evidence-based info, often with recommendations to see professionals.

[15:00] Healthcare Professional Content:

• The study hoped for more professionals creating content. Data shows professional videos had fewer likes than non-professional, likely due to presentation style.

“People just didn’t resonate much with healthcare professional information, which makes sense because the way it was being described was very clinical...” – Skye Waterson ([15:29])

[17:00] Even Professionals Err:

• 20% of healthcare professional videos were misleading—underscoring that credentials aren’t a foolproof guarantee of accuracy.

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4. Study Findings

[18:22] Results Breakdown:

• 52% of videos were misleading
• 27% were personal experience
• 21% were classified as useful

[18:57] Separation of Personal Experience and Useful:

• The hosts question whether this distinction is fair, as much of ADHD advocacy and awareness builds on individual accounts.

“I don’t know if I feel great about the fact that we’re separating useful and personal experience here.” – William Curb ([18:57])

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5. Nuance and Misinformation

[19:48 & 20:03] The Role of Nuance:

• The most common source of misinformation is lack of nuance—oversimplifying ADHD as “just a dopamine deficit” or “just overstimulation.”
• Both hosts stress that social media creators, regardless of intent or expertise, risk spreading inaccuracies.

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6. Actionable Takeaways

For Viewers:

• Treat TikTok and similar platforms as a starting point—verify claims elsewhere.

“Maybe using these spaces like TikTok as a jumping off point to go, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting. I wonder if that’s true,’ rather than going, ‘I just heard that, and therefore that is true.’” – Skye Waterson ([20:39])

For Creators:

• Try to cite sources—even if only in the comments or descriptions.

“Maybe that’s the thing we can all take away from this is like, hey, go back to citing your sources. You can put it in the comments. It’s not going to kill your, your reach.” – Skye Waterson ([22:14])

On the Value of Research Recaps:

• The hosts hope listeners appreciate the deep dives and encourage feedback and topic suggestions for future episodes.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On User Experience:
  • “TikTok has a very good algorithm at capturing attention. It was just hard for me to both be on there and then being like, I don’t think I should use this...” – William Curb ([04:26])
• On the Challenge of Accuracy on Social Media:
  • “Everybody on social media might be misleading you because even the people who were doing it in an academic context... they still had some misleading information.” – Skye Waterson ([20:39])
• On Citing Sources:
  • “The citing of sources is really important because we want to know where people are getting their information so that people can check for themselves. Because I know I’m going to get things wrong.” – William Curb ([21:17])

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Key Segment Timestamps

• [02:27] Episode proper begins, introducing William, Research Recap, and Skye
• [03:44] – [06:20] Discussion of TikTok usage and personal boundaries
• [06:20] – [08:47] Study background and methodology (PEMAT & JAMA criteria)
• [10:09] – [13:40] Specific examples of misleading or useful content
• [15:00] – [17:00] Contrast between professional and layperson content, popularity factors
• [18:22] – [20:39] Breakdown of study results and implications
• [21:17] – [22:14] The significance of source citation and transparency

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Conclusion

This episode offers a thoughtful, evidence-based exploration of how ADHD content circulates on TikTok, exposing the blurred lines between factual, personal, and misleading material. William and Skye advocate for critical consumption of social media content and more transparency from creators, recognizing the power—and pitfalls—of platforms like TikTok in shaping popular understanding of mental health.

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Transcript

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[William Curb]

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[William Curb]

Welcome to hacking youg ADHD I'm your host William Curb, and I have ADHD on this podcast. I dig into the tools, tactics and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. And today I'm joined by Sky Waterson for our Research Recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and we dive into what the paper says, how it's conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways. In this episode we're going to be discussing a paper called TikTok and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, A Cross Sectional Study of Social Media Content Quality. So this was a paper from 2022 and got quite a bit of coverage at the time, but it was one I wanted to look at. Again, not because TikTok's been in the news. I just realized that while I was writing up my notes here that TikTok is having its US ownership change. That's not what we're going over today. This is just about this 2022 paper. Also, before we get started, I just wanted to mention that I'd love to hear what you guys think of the Research Recap series. So if you have thoughts, head on over to hackneydhd.com contact and let us know what you think. Also, if there's a particular paper or topic that you'd love for us to go over, please let us know. New episodes of Research Recap come out every other Friday. All right, that. Let's get into it. So sky, tell me what you know about TikTok.

[Sky Waterson]

Yes, I think this is a good start. So I had TikTok a few years ago and quite frankly I didn't love the like the channels that took me down. It was like, oh, you must want more of this. And I was like, I don't actually, I value my mental health. And and I ended up just turning it off. I ended up not using it. Does that mean I don't use shorts? No, I go on Instagram shorts, I go on YouTube shorts. I just have decided TikTok isn't for me. You won't actually find us on TikTok at all. So this was an interesting conversation because I was kind of coming at this from the perspective of somebody who is active on on social media shorts, but not necessarily Tick tock.

[William Curb]

Yeah, I, TikTok was, I had some channels on their videos I used to upload. I have not actively used TikTok in years just because, yeah, it was something that I felt actively detrimental to my health because it has a very good algorithm at capturing att. It was just hard for me to both be on there and then being like, I don't think I should use this also let me make videos for other people so they can be on there. And I'm like. And there's some hard to say what's the right answer there. But the right answer for me was just, I'm not gonna do this. Even though right now TikTok is on my phone because I wanted to look some of the old videos up, it hasn't really grabbed me again, I haven't had any trouble like dealing with the fact that it's there. I just don't open the app because it's not something that is actively in my head to do. Which I find is an interesting thing because one of the things I wanted to look at before we go into the studies. Okay, how much are people watching TikTok? Like how many videos are they doing? Because I think that's really relevant to the method they use that we'll talk about in a minute. But average TikTok user watches about 95 minutes of TikTok a day, which is hour and a half. That's a lot. But it's also not that much for some people. So average you go, there's, you have power users that are watching way more and then people that are just watching a couple videos a day. But the average via length is between 20 and 30 seconds. The some of them can be as short as three seconds and apparently in some regions you can now have 30 minute long videos, which seems not to YouTube. Yeah, yeah, that's what YouTube's for. But the bottom line here I think is that the average user is going to be seeing hundreds of videos a day. Especially if you consider things they're just like scrolling by immediately.

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And so in terms of this actual paper, it's a very interesting paper. I feel like we're going to have to start with caveats about various things before we get into it, but essentially what they wanted to look at is they were looking at, okay, if social media platforms are being used to disseminate mental health information online. They actually said that the hashtag ADHD was the seventh most popular health related hashtag on the platform, which is really crazy in some ways because health is such a big space. They wanted to see if what was going on, what was being posted on TikTok was something that was going to be considered to be beneficial, correct. Information about ADHD. Could you go on TikTok and get the information about ADHD that you actually needed? According to this paper? We'll get into that as well.

[William Curb]

Yeah. And so what they did is they went, okay, we're going to look at this adhd, we're going to look at the hundred most popular videos within that hashtag. And then we are going to assess it on two things. This patient educational materials assessment tool for audiovisual materials, PET or PMAT ev. And it is that basically that's just. Can you understand the videos? It's really not about the quality. It's more about or like the how good the information is really just about, hey, can you understand what the people are saying? Is it important? And in general, they found almost all the videos were very well done there. And then there was also the Journal of American Medical association benchmark criteria, the jama. And that is the one that a lot of people had issue with in regards to this study. I can pull up my thing on Jamma, but you have anything to say about it?

[Sky Waterson]

Just, it's an interesting one because I think as somebody who started out on the Internet posting articles that had a lot of references, I understand that, you know, the importance of doing things. I probably still didn't do it according to Jamma because I didn't know about Jammer. And I think that's something that we're going to get into in a minute. But yeah, tell us about what they. What was their expectations?

[William Curb]

Yeah, so the JAMA things are looking at authorship. Like are they. Who are they crediting this for? Is the attribution clear? Can they find that easily? Like, then, you know, the disclosure of, hey, where are you doing stuff to getting paid to say this, any of that kind of stuff that that's incredibly important to have that kind of disclosure, especially with the number of ads that have ADHD information in them and then the how current the information is. But I think the most important parts here is the slight attribution aspect and who are they attributing this to kind of stuff that is the big issue that comes up because social. That's hard to do on social media properly.

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so their expectation was that if you met their criteria, you were essentially coming on talking about something to do with adhd. That was correct. That was factually correct. You were citing your sources you were providing references for people to find those sources. And when you looked at the examples that they were using, a large portion of those were also saying, and if you want to like fully understand if you have adhd, you have to go and get diagnosed by a professional. So all of that was being put into a 30 second clip in order for it to meet the criteria.

[William Curb]

Which now with that said, there are examples of misleading statements. I was like, I could.

[Sky Waterson]

Oh, that's.

[William Curb]

That is. Yes, the examples of misleading statements. So they had like videos describing ADHD paralysis, which. That's its own thing. It's. I don't want to go into.

[Sky Waterson]

Well, it's a tough one because emotional dysregulation and ADHD up until recently was considered something that was not in academic research and therefore you couldn't talk about it, but now it is. And actually one of the reasons people started talking about it was because people talked about the personal experiences of it on TikTok or places like that.

[William Curb]

And yeah, but then they also had videos taking that ADHD is equally common between girls and boys, which research doesn't support that. But that often is because women are under diagnosed. So it's hard. Research doesn't say it, but it's. We don't. And then also that ADHD symptoms only intensify with the onset of puberty. I was surprised that that was listed as misinformation. I was felt that was something that was.

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah, I have, I have seen that in studies. I think the one that. Because we're not doing a very good job of examples here. I think the one that really stood out to me as an example was somebody said, had a video that was like, if you listen to this, it will tell you if you have adhd. It was like an audio like that kind of stuff that just kind of off the wall wild stuff where it's like nothing.

[William Curb]

This one I saw the ADHD lacks object permanence, which is a. That's again where the attribution is wrong here. Where people are like, I'm calling this object permanence. That's not what that's called. That's something babies deal with. Also apparently that's really bad research as well when I looked into it. But that's not the point of this video. But yeah, the out of sight, out of mind is not object permanence. That we forget some object permanence is more about the idea that once something leaves your field of view that you don't even know it exists anymore. Not that. Yeah, it's you don't know where it is and you're not thinking about it. Because I could be like. Like, you asked me to put some scissors in a drawer and then I put the scissors in the drawer. At that point, I don't know scissors exist anymore. But if you asked me, hey, where'd you put the things? I'd be like, in the drawer. So it's a different aspect.

[Sky Waterson]

It's very different. Yeah. And so there was some things that were, yeah, very much misleading. If you'd been on. If you'd been on TikTok and you had said, and some people do, this is going to be my sole source of information about ADHD and symptoms and all that kind of stuff, then that could be quite misleading. And it could potentially lead you down a path of thinking you have it when you don't have it, or thinking you don't have it when you do have it because you're like, I don't have object permanence, so. Or I do, or something like that.

[William Curb]

And yeah, so they classified the videos in three different ways. They were class or actually should say how they just went about it. They had two people watch the videos and classify them as either misleading personal experience or as useful. And if the people disagreed, they had a third person come in and decide on if it. Which one it was. Yeah.

[Sky Waterson]

And so they had really good criteria. Like, one of the cool things about this paper was they had a criteria they were using was more about the. To what end? Because they did a few things that were quite interesting. So one was if a personal experience video contained any generalized misleading statements, it was classified as misleading rather than personal experience, which becomes relevant when you find out personal experience is one of the most popular. Like it was the most useful, which makes sense. That's what a lot of us are interested in. And then in terms of their examples of useful videos, it was really interesting because they had, you know, videos describing auditory processing disorder could be comorbid with adhd, but a medical or audiological assessment is required for this to be diagnosed. Or videos saying that ADHD symptoms of daydreaming, sleep disturbances and school difficulties could all be symptoms of adhd. Again, recommendation to see a professional, mental health professional if the viewer is wondering about ADHD and this is some kind. This is the kind of language use that you would really only find with healthcare professionals. You're not gonna necessarily see that a lot in people who are, say, doing a POV of the day in their life experiencing ADHD symptoms.

[William Curb]

Yeah. And that did seem to be One of the things that they were really looking for, they wanted to use this as a launch pad to get more healthcare professionals making these kind of videos so that we could have. And I've seen some. And there are some people that are really good at doing it, and there are some people that you're like, this is okay information, but man, you are.

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah.

[William Curb]

Not doing this for an ADHD audience.

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And although when you looked at the difference between the health care professionals and the non healthcare professionals, it wasn't a significant difference in terms of views and likes and shared shares. One of the great things about having the real data is when you look at the real data, you do see, okay, well, the mean likes were 6,500 and, you know, and then the other one was like 402,000. So it's like, sorry, I said that wrong, 653,400 for non healthcare professionals in terms of mean likes versus 402,000 for healthcare professionals in terms of mean likes. So there was a stark difference. And you saw that across the views, across the shares, people just didn't resonate much with healthcare professional information, which makes sense because the way it was being described was very clinical and not necessarily something that was going to be scroll stopping, if you want to talk about that idea.

[William Curb]

Yeah, So I do think that's a. One of the big issues is presentation matters a lot in this kind of thing. And I'll admit in the last few years, I have seen more healthcare professionals that are switching from primarily being healthcare to going more to the influencer model because they think they can help more people that way. And some of them are very good. Some of them are not good. In fact, like, even here, like they had.

[Sky Waterson]

So some of them were misleading.

[William Curb]

Yeah, they had. 20% of the healthcare professional videos were misleading. Admittedly, that is a very small. So we have 100 videos and then only. I think 11 of them were.

[Sky Waterson]

11. Yeah. So numerically we're talking.

[William Curb]

Yeah. And then three of them were misleading. So that makes it like, oh, my God, it's 27%.

[Sky Waterson]

It's just three people who forgot to cite their source. But I think the conversation of citing your sources is an interesting one because, you know, look, I'll be totally real. We do this, right? We come on, you know, and we do this podcast. Part of the reason is because we're very passionate about helping people find the real research and as much as possible, sharing that information with as much knowledge as possible. I don't claim to be an expert on everything, but when it comes to posting that on social media, I have had a bit of a conflict of interest around, do I cite the source? Do I say this is. You know, I always say this is based on research, but do I then put the source in the link or not? Because, you know, do people need that? Or do. Can they go to the podcast for that information? This is kind of making me want to put my sources back in and be like, hey, I'll take the hit in terms of interest.

[William Curb]

Yeah. Because I don't want to land on the wrong side of things. But yeah, at the same time, I'm going is because I guess to go at what their findings were. They found that 52% of videos were misleading, 27% personal experience, and then only 21% were seen as useful ADHD information. I did not. When I, like, looked at those numbers, I was like, man, I don't know if I feel great about the fact that we're separating useful and personal experience here.

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah. I think, honestly, that was maybe the biggest thing for me because a lot of what we talk about is our personal experience. The personal experience of. In my case, I work with clients, so clients experiences. And it's an interesting one because, you know, there's lots of things, like some people struggle to get diagnosis. You know, you can't just say, if you want to know this, you should get diagnosed. It's like thousands of dollars, and it doesn't even happen in my country for the next nine months. You know, these things can be problematic. And then when you're talking about the. What makes it useful. Yeah. Personal experiences, like, that's where the conversation about rejection sensitivity comes in. And some of that still isn't in the. In the research. But in some ways, the research needs to catch up with what people are saying. So it's a bit of a chicken and egg there as well.

[William Curb]

Yeah. And I don't want people to come away from this podcast with them thinking that we're saying there's no misinformation about.

[Sky Waterson]

This is a research episode series. We. We are literally looking at academic research. We clearly like this stuff.

[William Curb]

Yeah. And because there is tons of misinformation about ADHD in there, especially from popular creators who maybe don't understand the nuance of what's going on. And that's often what a lot of misinformation comes from, is that lack of nuance where they're like, oh, ADHD is just a dopamine deficit idea, or ADHD is just being over or understimulated and it's, yeah, that might have aspects of it, but you can't. Nuance is such an important part of the conversation.

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah. And I think maybe if you were to take away a practical thing from this, it would be that everybody on social media might be misleading you because even the people who were doing it in an academic context, like, hello, I'm a doctor, this is what I'm saying, you know, this is. The references, they still had some misleading information. So I think it's worth doing your own research, maybe using these spaces like TikTok as a jumping off point to go, oh, that's really interesting. I wonder if that's true, rather than going, I just heard that, and therefore that is true.

[William Curb]

Yeah. Yeah. Especially I've seen stuff from someone's like, oh, They've got a PhD and I'm looking at their stuff and I'm like, oh, they have a PhD in education or something. And they're just using that as a way to build their credibility. And not saying that you PhD in education is bad. It's just that if you're looking at something psychological, you probably want that kind of degree. Not that. And then I also have to acknowledge that, oh, yeah, I, I don't have any of those fancy numbers or letters behind my name. So it's, it's. I think the citing of sources is really important because we want to know where people are getting their information so that people can check for themselves. Because I know I'm going to get things wrong. And yeah, I don't want that to make people think, oh, he's doing everything wrong. This is why. This is. I'm trying to do my best. And that's why I really hope for most people online.

[Sky Waterson]

Yeah, I think that's probably the takeaway if you're, if you are posting things online, try and cite your sources. I have seen some very prominent magazines and journals in ADHD space that do not cite their sources. And I have to say, sometimes you go, well, why? You know, like, I have this and I have this and this is known. And you know, to, to somebody maybe in the academic space, this is so well known, it feels silly to kind of cite the source again. But maybe that's the thing we can all take away from this is like, hey, go back to citing your sources. You can put it in the comments. It's not going to kill your, your reach. But in terms of, yeah. And then in terms of people who are viewing it, it's going, okay, this is a jumping off point for knowledge. It's not the source of knowledge. Hello. So you were just listening to a research recap. I'm Skye Waterson of Unconventional Organization. If you like that, there's lots more information about ADHD and support support for you@unconventional organization.com you can go ahead and check that out. Lots of free resources, lots of strategies. And if you want to join our programs, you can do that as well. And we'll see you there. Unconventional Organization.

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